Emerging Concept of Personalization Is Changing Content Marketing

August 8, 2017

The ever evolving digital revolution has transformed the way brands engage and interact with their audiences. In the present era, conventional advertisements are declining and social media marketing trends are rising making content personalization a go-to marketing strategy for brands. Today, our clan of Content Marketers at Pulse Digital agency dubai will share how personalized content caters to consumers’ needs and how brands must keep up with the high demand of voracious appetite for content utilization.

In the year 2015, Gartner published a report that sent waves across the marketing world. The reports say, “By 2018, Companies who are investing in all types of personalization will outsell companies by 20 percent that are not putting any effort or money.”

Now a lot of marketers ignore it considering 20 percent is a small number, however, twenty percent is a big margin to rule out competitors, in fact; this difference could be decisive and can make companies run out of business. While Gartner’s report won’t be tested for another year, there is no contradiction that personalization is already positive showing signs about how companies must adapt personalization and do business.

Some of the most famous digital services like Netflix and Amazon keep personalization at the core of their products – programmatically generated “recommendations for you” are everywhere. Retail and CPG companies from Walmart to Glossier to True&Co adhere to personalization in their present and future strategies.

Therefore, while considering personalization in your business strategies, it is important to understand that the power of personalization may not show a huge impact in B2C businesses but gains immense traction in B2B space, especially with the rise of account based marketing (ABM).

A study by DemandWave says, 29 percent of B2B marketers apply personalization in their content strategy whereas, 49 percent of them find it effective.

To truly optimize customer journey on a website, personalized content plays as the atomic unit of marketing. Now the challenge is how marketers are pulling these strings to play much better? Are they really adapting to the push?

Data-driven Curation and Creation

According to Content Marketing Institute’s definition of Content Personalization, it says, “Content personalization is a strategy that exploits visitor or prospect data to deliver relevant content based on the interests and preferences of the target audience.”

personalized content marketing

Content personalization is an emerging tool to boost engagement, drive value and ultimately ensure readers keep coming back. In a recent study by PwC’s Digital Group, creating a personalized experience for customers is a top priority for businesses and 94% of senior level executives believe that content personalization is critical to reaching and retaining customers. As content marketing becomes more successful, personalization becomes more popular, and it’s also going to become more competitive.

For years, both brands and publishers have been curating and creating content based on their target audience. Today, data collection has gone through a huge shift; and we can see that things have got more sophisticated and technologically advanced in attributions, automation and optimization and tagging. Similarly, content personalization has become easier in some ways and more complexed in others. But one thing is crystal clear – Personalization Works out Wonders! A research by Demand Metric in 2016 shows that for over 80 percent of marketers say personalized content is more effective than “unpersonalised” content.

Now the point is, are content marketers taking enough advantages from content personalization? Are they using it or still bent on utilizing conventional marketing strategies?

A Forrester Report suggests that personalization is often a reactive and manually tailored process: marketers analyze behavioral and identity based data from first and third party sources and then use that to curate future content strategies and deployments.

The future of the practice is expected to be much more automated. Therefore, top martech companies ensure user journey with automatically optimized and personalized content for each customer. And soon A/B testing headlines, automated email campaigns and content recommendations will become more commonplace.

Optimizely, an optimization software company believes that traditional idea of the customer pattern will change remarkably. According to Brigitte Donner, VP of Product Marketing at Optimizely, “Moving forward, I think we’re going to see less of a linear journey.” He added, “In reality, with all the available channels and customer touch points that exist today, decision- making is an iterative, circular process, and it will be necessary to have content available at each of these touch points.”

The more you personalize, the harder it gets!

what is content personalization

Content personalization is not a piece of cake, in fact as it grows on a larger level, it gets harder and adds to the responsibilities of Content Marketer. Many of the marketers are focused on curating and creating a smooth flow of content, whereas, bringing personalization demands them to target and customize content based on behaviors, segments, demographics and in the case of ABM, even individual accounts. Not surprisingly, there are two big reasons why marketers don’t personalize content are:

Lack of resources/bandwidth

Lack of technological support

importance of personalization in marketing

A data driven approach is one of the coolest ways to work on personalized content. However, all variables like target audience segmentation, behavioural patterns, channel performance and demographics must be a part of the process.

Just like, internet has given this globe a new digital world, automation and machine learning have opened new doors of possibilities. Companies and brands can now carry out A/B tests from headlines to the body of the homepage.

Today, targeted push on social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook ensure that your personalized content reaches the right audience. Simply put, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for marketers and strategists who are willing to reach the right audience, in the right manner at the right time. And if new technologies takes off like experts expect, the revolution will not just be personalized but huge too!